Dealing With Incompetence

Does incompetence infuriate you? How do you deal with people demonstrating incompetence in an area they should be competent in that involves you? They say patience is a virtue, but why? What is patience even? Patience is me sacrificing my time and energy to baby you through some shit because you chose not to sacrifice your own time and energy for when you were supposed to? Yeah of course I'm upset.

I've gotta be in the wrong here. What's the "take ownership of the situation" approach? Is it to just do everything yourself? That doesn't seem right either.

Comments (8)

Incompetence often stems from being lost or having shit teachers. Patience and good teaching skills are key and help make people valuable helpers down the line. If someone is consistently incompetence despite your best efforts, the blame is still 50/50. If many fail at teaching someone, chances are they are dumb. If you fail to teach many, chances are you're a shit teacher.

What adds to the fire is if they don't give a shit about their incompetence.

But, patience with others is a work of mercy so I try to be as chill as possible, unless it is a large fuck up, and then I feel I am obligated to take action in some way.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee

Does incompetence infuriate you? How do you deal with people demonstrating incompetence in an area they should be competent in that involves you? They say patience is a virtue, but why? What is patience even? Patience is me sacrificing my time and energy to baby you through some shit because you chose not to sacrifice your own time and energy for when you were supposed to? Yeah of course I'm upset.

I've gotta be in the wrong here. What's the "take ownership of the situation" approach? Is it to just do everything yourself? That doesn't seem right either.

Depends. Everyone is entitled to make a mistake on something once, not twice. If I ask someone to do a job that they don't have previous knowledge of, I think it's fine if they ask for help, or if they try and ask me to work through their mistakes with them. Ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure, and all that.

If it's happening multiple times thereafter, though, it becomes an issue. I get frustrated with other people easily, but at the end of the day basically every business boils down to a relationship, so it's counterproductive to vent on someone unless it is really egregious. That person may be awful at A, but great at B, and one day you may need their help with that yourself.

My issue isn't with being incompetent. That's totally fine and if you're someone who's always learning new shit, you'll always be experiencing incompetence in yourself and working on it. But you're supposed to do that shit in private and emerge into the world when you're self-sufficient. Wasting my finite time on this earth at your expense is a violent act of aggression in my book.